Vendor
	Foundry Claire Harris
Original language
English
Categories
Biography, Literature & Literary studies
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stephaniekegan.com

GOLDEN STATE

Stephanie Kegan

In the vein of Defending Jacob or We Need to Talk About Kevin, a compelling literary drama about finding evil close to home and how far a woman will go to protect her family.

All her life, Natalie Askedahl has been the good girl, an obedient team player. Growing up as the youngest child in one of California’s most prominent political families, she worshipped her big brother, Bobby, a sensitive math prodigy who served as her protector and confidante. But after Bobby left home at sixteen on a Harvard scholarship, something changed between them as Bobby retreated deeper into his own head. Now that Natalie is a happily married, with a lawyer husband, two young daughters, and a house in the Berkeley Hills, her only real regret is losing Bobby.

Then, a bomb explodes in the middle of her ideal-seeming life. Her oldest daughter is on the Stanford campus when one person is killed and another maimed. Worse, other attacks follow across California. Frightened for her family, Natalie grows obsessed with the case of the so-called Cal Bomber, until she makes an unthinkable discovery: the bomber’s infamous manifesto reads alarmingly like the last letter she has from Bobby, whom she has seen only once in fifteen years.

Unable to face the possibility that her sweet brother could be a monster and a murderer, is confronted with a terrible choice, about who to sacrifice and who to protect. The decision she makes will send her down a rabbit hole of confusion, lies, and betrayals that threaten to destroy her relationships with everyone she holds dear. As her life splits irrevocably into before and after, what she begins to learn is that some of the most dangerous things in the world are the stories we tell ourselves.

Stephanie Kegan is a freelance writer who has been published in Self, Los Angeles Magazine, and the Los Angeles Times. A native of Southern California, she earned her BA in history from UC Berkeley and attended Journalism School at the University of Southern California. She lives in Los Angeles with her family.

Available products
Book Published 2015-02-17 by Free Press
Book Published 2015-02-17 by Free Press

Comments

So engrossing, I abandoned everything else I was reading until I had read this entire book.” Read more...

What would you do if you suspected your beloved brother was the man responsible for a string of college campus bombings? In this intense, provocative novel, a Berkeley woman’s response to that dilemma nearly destroys her life. Her wrenching experience will resonate with anyone who’s ever watched a loved one self-destruct.

With hints of We Need to Talk About Kevin and loosely based on the Unabomber case of the 1990s, Kegan’s (The Baby) novel shows what can happen when mental illness is left untreated. Read more...

A novel that strikes all the proper notes…” Read more...

This work is delicately crafted and works gently, via accumulation of small, apparently homely scenes and ideas: a child’s made-up words, a skirt worn by a woman, a copy of a magazine…Kegan is ultimately not about mayhem and murder, but about whether innocence is a ‘golden state. Read more...

In prose more readable and brisk and light-filled than any I’ve read in a long time, Stephanie Kegan has created an intimate portrait of a woman whose lifelong love of her big brother can’t be compromised even by his monstrous crimes. Golden State is a moral story of the supremacy of love over law, rendered moving by the tenderness of the ordinary domestic day-to-day life wherein these atrocities come to be revealed.

Loosely based on the case of the Unabomber, Stephanie Kegan’s GOLDEN STATE centers on a California school teacher whose life is upended when she turns in her beloved big brother for acts of terrorism—but still can’t help fighting to save him, even at the expense of her husband and daughters. Kegan’s masterful, stirring portrait of familial love raises moral questions that’ll have you twisting in your seat, asking yourself, 'What would I do?

Stephanie Kegan’s Golden State signals the arrival of an exciting new voice in contemporary American fiction. Here is a California novel like no other, where an influential family’s turbulent legacy, and one woman’s decision, ultimately shapes the destiny of an entire state. In a landscape that is at once as serene and Edenic as it is volatile and combustible, Kegan’s writing is deft, finely calibrated, and emotionally resonant. With a cast of characters that feel so familiar they could be our own kin, nothing is spared here as we witness the lengths Natalie Askedahl—wife, mother, sister—will go to in order to protect the ones she loves most.